ISO/PWI TS 18244

Biodiversity and the Food Sector: Guidelines on how to improve biodiversity performance of food companies and food retailers

Scope

This document addresses actors of the food sector – especially food producers and retailers – to develop and implement a sound biodiversity management with the aim to continuously improve the biodiversity performance. It will provide recommendations for the ways in which businesses of the food sector can contribute to the reduction of the main causes of the loss of biodiversity and towards the protection and enhancement of biodiversity. Synergies between biodiversity protection and climate mitigation and adaptation will be underlined. The Guidelines will include practical information and positive examples on how to consider biodiversity protection in the policy, strategy and sourcing rules as well as in the different “units” of food companies. Improvement of biodiversity performance in the supply chains – especially sourcing of agricultural raw material – will be one focal point of the guidelines.
The chapters of the guidelines will be structured according to the structure of an environmental management system such as ISO 14001. This will facilitate the orientation and help users to integrate biodiversity issues into existing management systems. Within others, the guidelines will describe how to integrate biodiversity into the environmental management system (e.g. ISO 14001) of organisations of the food sector. The guideline will be elaborated in liaison with ISO/TC 34 on Food Products and will complement quality concepts by integrating biodiversity.